Abc Family Channel

Maureen Smith, president of ABC Family Channel, resigned as president of the cable network, which was acquired by Walt Disney Co. and renamed this year. Smith, 37, had been president since September 2000. She said she had planned to step down after Disney acquired the channel as part of its $5.2-billion acquisition of Fox Family Worldwide last year from News Corp. and Saban Entertainment. Disney said a replacement would be named this week. Disney shares closed down 34 cents at $22.

Walt Disney Co. is poised to elevate an executive who began his career as a reporter covering the strife in Belfast, Northern Ireland, as the new president of ABC Entertainment. Now, Paul Lee will venture into another divided landscape to pick up the pieces after ABC's short-fused president, Steve McPherson, abruptly resigned this week. Lee was on vacation Wednesday and not available for comment. Disney executives were uncertain whether his new employment agreement would be completed by Sunday, when McPherson was supposed to take the stage in Beverly Hills to tout ABC's new fall shows to more than 200 reporters.

A court hearing on Walt Disney Co.'s request for an injunction to prevent EchoStar Communications Corp., the nation's second-largest satellite firm, from dropping the ABC Family channel has been postponed. Attorneys for both companies agreed with U.S. District Court Judge Gary Feess to reschedule the hearing to Jan. 17 to allow the court more time to review additional briefs both sides are preparing for the hearing.

A comedy called "Melissa & Joey," starring and produced by Melissa Joan Hart and Joey Lawrence, received a 10-episode order from ABC Family and will premiere this year. Hart, who starred in "Sabrina the Teenage Witch" from 1996 to 2003, will portray the grown-up former wild child of a political family who is now a local politician herself and is forced to care for her teenage niece and pre-adolescent nephew after her sister is jailed and her brother-in-law flees after a scandal hits.

Walt Disney Co.'s ABC Family cable-television network lost $362.9 million in the quarter ended Dec. 31 after Disney wrote off the value of programming it will no longer use. The loss contrasted with net income of $8.49 million a year earlier, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. ABC Family Worldwide Inc.'s sales declined 27% to $134.7 million from $184.9 million.

A look at baseball's postseason television schedule, which wasn't completed until Sunday night, might prompt one to ask, "What's wrong with this picture?" What are baseball playoff games doing on the ABC Family Channel? And why are the St. Louis Cardinals and Arizona Diamondbacks on ABC Family tonight at 8? That's 11 p.m. EDT. Kids in the East will have to stay up until maybe 2 a.m. on a school night to watch the whole game.

Walt Disney Co.'s battle with cable and satellite operators over its new ABC Family channel escalated this week when it sued EchoStar Communications Corp. to prevent the satellite TV company from dropping the network Jan. 1. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court late Monday, provides a rare glimpse into the hard-nosed tactics between programmers and their distributors that rarely come into public view.

The TV series "The Secret Life of the American Teenager" opens with a 15-year-old girl coming home from band practice, reaching into her French horn case and pulling out a home pregnancy test. Her horrified look confirms the results. No less startled are some parents whose children watch the ABC Family cable program that revolves around the sex lives of high school students.

Walt Disney Co. named ABC Daytime head Angela Shapiro president of its recently acquired ABC Family Channel. Shapiro, 52, replaces Maureen Smith, who resigned Tuesday. Shapiro, co-founder of Soap Opera Digest, became president of ABC Daytime in 1998, overseeing a lineup that includes "One Life to Live" and "General Hospital." Shapiro also started the annual "Super Soap Weekend" at Disney-MGM Studios in Orlando.

Roseanne gets booted: ABC on Tuesday canceled the two-week-old "The Real Roseanne Show," saying it would fill the Wednesday night slot with episodes of "George Lopez" and "The Drew Carey Show" until the new season begins next month.

Walt Disney Co., seeking to broaden the audience for its broadcast and cable shows on the Internet's most popular video site, struck a deal Monday with Google Inc.'s YouTube to distribute short-form content from ESPN and ABC. The agreement would extend the Internet reach for ESPN's sports highlights and ABC News updates and provide another outlet for video snippets taken from the ABC broadcast network and ABC Family cable channel shows.

The TV series "The Secret Life of the American Teenager" opens with a 15-year-old girl coming home from band practice, reaching into her French horn case and pulling out a home pregnancy test. Her horrified look confirms the results. No less startled are some parents whose children watch the ABC Family cable program that revolves around the sex lives of high school students.

Cable programmer Discovery Communications Inc. on Tuesday began its march into Hollywood by plucking a veteran TV executive to run its TLC cable channel, which it hopes to turn into a more popular destination for women. The hiring of Angela Shapiro-Mathes, president of Fox TV Studios and a former Walt Disney Co. executive, represents a dramatic departure for the Silver Spring, Md.-based company. Discovery to date has largely operated outside the media power centers of L.A. and New York.

Two cable TV channel operators have agreed to pay a combined $1.5 million in fines to settle probes into whether they violated federal rules on the amount and kind of advertising aired during children's shows. Viacom Inc., owner of the Nickelodeon channel, agreed to pay $1 million after it allegedly violated Federal Communications Commission rules restricting children's TV advertising to 10.5 to 12 minutes per one-hour episode. Walt Disney Co.'

The scent of money was in the mountain air. Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Michael Eisner had come to the resort town of Sun Valley, Idaho, with his company's wallet wide open -- a risky move at a gathering of voracious moguls. The year was 2001, and Eisner was under pressure to bulk up Disney, much as his competitors had done through mergers and acquisitions. America Online was now the owner of Time Warner. Media giant Viacom had gobbled up CBS, along with some cable channels.

Sharpening their attack on Walt Disney Co. and its chief executive, former directors Roy E. Disney and Stanley P. Gold have accused the company of concealing from shareholders the diminished value of one of its key cable channels. But outside experts say the Burbank conglomerate seems to be operating within the scope of federal accounting rules, despite questions that for weeks have been swirling around the finances of the ailing ABC Family Channel.

Under a court order issued Tuesday, EchoStar Communications Corp. will continue carrying Walt Disney Co.'s ABC Family channel on its satellite TV service until March 11 to allow for a period of third-party discovery and depositions in the contract dispute suit. The U.S. District Court granted Disney's request for an injunction last month to prevent EchoStar from dropping the channel on Dec. 31.

Walt Disney Co. has new allies in the fight to keep ABC Family channel on DirecTV. Fans of televangelist Pat Robertson's talk show, "The 700 Club," which appears several times each weekday on ABC Family, have flooded DirecTV President Roxanne Austin's corporate office with phone calls to protest its plans to drop the channel.

Hollywood is full of know-it-alls. Walt Disney Co.'s Anne Sweeney isn't among them. "She's comfortable not having all the answers," said cable industry pioneer Geraldine Laybourne, who built the Nickelodeon channel and was Sweeney's mentor. "I put her in one new situation after another, knowing she could figure it out." That trait is sure to be put to the test as Sweeney now tackles the biggest challenge of her career: trying to turn around ABC Television.

The president of ABC Family is set to resign in the wake of an organizational shakeup aimed at improving the performance of the Walt Disney Co.-owned cable channel. Disney is expected to announce this week that Angela Shapiro will step down, sources familiar with the matter said Sunday. Neither Shapiro nor Disney executives would comment. Shapiro's departure was widely anticipated since the company's announcement earlier this month that it was folding ABC Family into the ABC Cable network group.